amSynth

An Open Source and real-time polyphonic analogue modeling synthesizer for Linux systems

editor's review

download

specifications

changelog

amSynth is an open source and free graphical software implemented in C++ around the GTK+ toolkit and designed to provide a classic subtractive synthesizer topology that supports ALSA, OSS and JACK audio servers for audio and MIDI I/O.

Features at a glance

Key features include dual oscillators with classic waveforms, including sine, square, saw and noise, 12/24 dB/oct low, high and band-pass resonant filter, independent ADSR envelopes for amplitude and filter, reverb, and distortion.

The application is also available as LV2 and DSSI plugins, supports LFO (Low-frequency Oscillation), which can be used to module the filter, amplitude and oscillators. It works only on Linux kernel-based operating systems, but it’s also distributed as LV2 and DSSI plugins.

Getting started with amSynth

The application can be easily installed from the main software repositories of various distributions of Linux, as well as by compiling the latest source archive, which can be downloaded for free from this page.

If you want to run run music application side-by-side and for best performance,it is recommended to use amSynth in combination with a JACK audio system. Therefore, you should install and start the JACK audio server using the QJackCtl program.

Press the “Setup” button on the main window and check if the correct audio device is in use, as well as if the “MIDI Driver" is set to seq. Then, press the “Start” button and fire up amSynth from the main menu of your desktop environment.

To test the audio output, you should press and hold the “Audition” button in amSynth. To connect a MIDI device, press the “Connect” button on the QJackCtl app, go to the MIDI tab, and then connect ‘system:midi_capture_X’ to ‘amsynth:midi_in’.